


Should Have Been Somebody Else

by htbthomas



Category: The Greatest American Hero
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, Original Female Character(s) - Freeform, Pam Gets the Suit, Post-Season/Series 03, Reveal, Superpowers, Teamwork, Yuletide 2015
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-24
Updated: 2015-12-24
Packaged: 2018-05-08 02:12:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5479472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/htbthomas/pseuds/htbthomas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pam holds it in her hands, running her thumbs over the material. She’s felt it a million times, carrying it, folding it, pressing her hands to it in terror… But that was the one belonging to Ralph.</p><p>--</p><p> </p><p>  <i>The one where Pam gets the suit.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Should Have Been Somebody Else

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mark_C](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mark_C/gifts).



> For my recipient, who wanted Pam to get the suit and not lose the book!
> 
> Thank you to my beta, LadySilver, who is always more help than she knows. ♥

_Believe it or not_

Pam holds it in her hands, running her thumbs over the material. She’s felt it a million times, carrying it, folding it, pressing her hands to it in terror… But that was the one belonging to Ralph.

The symbol is the same, as well as the color. There’s a cape, boots and a belt. If she puts this on, the media will probably take to calling her “Hero-Girl,” never mind that she’s nearly thirty, and an accomplished lawyer. Maybe she should just get out ahead of it, give them a name to use, like “Lady Justice.” No, there’s probably a comic-book heroine with that name already.

Pam sets the suit back into the box, shaking her head. How can she even consider this? She’s seen what it’s done to Ralph, to his job, to his life, to their relationship. She closes the box. Then she gently places it in the bottom drawer of her filing cabinet.

The file drawer closes with a metallic thunk, and she pauses. The sound was so final, like a judge’s gavel declaring the case closed. But that’s what she wants.

It is.

She’s going to leave it there until it disappears in, what had the alien said? 48 hours. Ralph doesn’t have to know, Bill doesn’t have to know. No one does, except Agent Blake, or whatever her name was. She’d taken copious notes, written down the license plate number of Pam’s VW bug, and said, “Tell no one what you’ve seen. This is a matter of national security.” Then she’d just… left.

That was over 24 hours ago. She only has less than a day left, and then the whole thing can fade into memory. She packs her briefcase with the files she needs to work on that night, reaches for the light switch, and starts to close the door. 

The phone rings.

It’s probably Ralph, wondering when she’ll be home for dinner. She lifts the handset, and says, “I’ll be home in fifteen minutes, I promise. Things just got crazy at the office—”

“You might need to change your plans.” It’s not Ralph.

 

_I’m walking on air_

Agent Blake takes her coffee black, one sugar. She prefers fountain pens to ballpoint, and wears contact lenses. Her nails are short, but not bitten-back. Her hair is light brown with a few streaks of grey, pulled back into a precise ponytail. There are no earrings, no rings, no jewelry at all. And she’s a woman of few words. When the waitress at the diner comes to refill their drinks, all she does is show assent.

Without conversation, studying Agent Blake—Liz—is all Pam has. She’s sure that Liz is cataloguing all her many assets, and faults, at the same time. So Ralph gets a gung-ho Red-Menace-fighting curmudgeon, and Pam gets first-in-her-class-at-Quantico. They’re all alone in this diner except the employees, so there’s not even other people’s conversations to listen in on.

“Have you put it on yet?” Liz’s voice is hushed, serious.

Finally. Something to talk about. She matches Liz in volume. “No.”

Liz nods.

Well, that was a bust. “I decided not to, based on my history with it.”

Liz nods again, adding a sip of coffee to her response.

Surely that at least deserved a, “What history?” but no. Pam sighs and takes a drink of her tea.

Liz sets down her coffee and says, “I can understand.”

Okay, that’s enough. “How? You guys get a lot of cases of aliens dropping supersuits on average law-abiding citizens at the FBI?” 

“No.” Liz folds her hands. “Just your husband’s.”

Pam’s eyes widen. She thought that Bill and Ralph’s “scenarios” all went into the secret files somewhere, need-to-know basis only.

She locks gazes with Pam. “I needed to know.” 

That makes sense.

“What does your husband think?” 

Pam averts her eyes from that hawk-eyed stare. “He doesn’t know. Or Bill. I haven’t told them, anyway. Did—?”

“Not yet. But if we’re going to be running ops with them, they—”

Pam bangs her fist on the table, and immediately regrets it, the way the sound echoes around the empty diner. “Who says we’re going to be running anything with them? I haven’t even agreed to wear the suit.”

Liz’s eyes narrow. “Time is ticking, Ms. Davidson-Hinkley.”

Pam fires back, “Let it run out, Agent Blake.”

The next few minutes are so silent that Pam can hear someone knocking around in the freezer in the back of the kitchen. But somewhere in the distance, out on the road in front of the diner, she can hear the roar of an engine. Is that… gunfire? And a siren.

Thirty seconds later, a car screams past, followed closely by a highway patrol car with lights flashing. A gunman fires another shot from the lead car and their waitress screams and ducks for cover.

So does Pam. She’s not wearing the suit yet! Then she freezes. Yet? Where did that come from.

Liz doesn’t even flinch, but her gun is out, cocked and ready. “Is it in the car?”

Pam wants to lie, to pretend she’d left it in the file cabinet, but she hadn’t. She’d brought it along for whatever unconscious reason. Pam sighs in defeat. “Yes.”

She changes in the backseat of the car, feeling like a total idiot. She doesn’t have time to read the instruction booklet. If she tried the suit on earlier, she could have read through, since it only works for the recipient of the suit, while they’re wearing it. So she leaves it in the box, trying to remember what Ralph does.

Is it three steps and jump? Or fist out, leap? Or…?

Okay, just do something. The gunfight is getting farther away by the minute. What if someone is dead?

She starts to run, hand out, and leaps.

The sign at Sue’s Diner will never be the same.

After she clips the corner, she starts tumbling end over end, and she lets out a long, keening wail, trying to course correct. She can hear Liz’s car, following on the road below. With her luck, she’ll crash-land on the hood.

At the last second, she straightens out, just missing the car. There are no shouts of derision like Bill would have done. Liz is probably silently rolling her eyes instead. 

She finds that if she puts her arm straight out in front of her, hand clenched in a fist, and the rest of her body straight, toes pointed like an Olympic diver, she goes faster. And she knows she’s getting close now, she can feel fear and anger radiating from up ahead. She wills herself faster, and she suddenly is, zooming through the air toward the gunmen and patrol car.

There. The car chase is only a few hundred yards ahead. She has to stop the lead car, but how? Fly in front and stop it with her hands? Fly behind and pick it up? Pull the roof off the car and yank out the gunmen?

She decides on the last option. Gliding downward the best she can, she lands on the roof. She doesn’t worry about the police behind; they’ll either stop firing, or it won’t matter, their bullets will bounce off the suit. But the thump of her boots must frighten the driver, because the car begins to careen wildly all over the road. 

A head pops out from the passenger side window. “What the hell?” He follows it with a gun.

For whatever reason—the suit maybe?—she gives him a goofy wave. Then she punches the gun out of his hand—and the guy in the face. He flops over the side, boneless. Time to get the other one. She punches through the roof with both hands at once, grabbing the edges and ripping open a hole in the top. The driver looks up at her in a panic and slams on the breaks, causing the car to fishtail even more wildly than before. She grabs him by the collar and yanks him up and into the air. Then she drops him at the feet of the officers, a man and a woman, who are getting out of the patrol car. “The other man is out cold, over there,” she tells them, pointing. She’s dropped her voice an octave for some reason. The suit again?

The female officer steps forward to cuff the man at their feet, while her partner goes after the other gunman. “Thank you, Miss—?”

Pam cuts her off. “No need for thanks.” Not until she comes up with a name, anyway. Oh god, she’s really going to do this, isn’t she?

She turns to go, and hears a crash behind her, but it’s not a car. “Officers! Can I help—?” The words cut off and then a rush of confusion hits her like a wave, from a mind she knows as well as the speaker’s voice. “Wh-who are you?”

She considers flying off, but he’ll just follow. And lack of instruction book or not, he’s got three more years experience at this. She turns slowly, guiltily.

His face goes from confusion to total shock. He looks from the twisted up roof of the car, to the captured criminals, to her identical suit. “You?”

With a cringing smile, she says, “Hi, honey.”

 

_I never thought I could feel so free_

Ralph’s first instinct, once they get back home, is to pick her up and spin her. “This is so great! I thought they were going to take away my suit, and replace Bill and me with another pair!” He steps back and looks at her identical suit, face full of admiration. “But instead, they gave another one to you! What did they say?”

She’s heard the story so many times, and there’s hardly a difference in what happened to her and Liz. Except… “The alien told me that Earth’s danger was increasing, that according to their calculations, two teams were necessary.”

“But why you? Why not someone on the other side of the world, in Asia or something?”

All Pam can do is shrug. She’d thought the same thing at first. “Maybe…”

Bill gets up from the armchair in the corner with an exasperated sigh. “They want us to work together, Counselor.”

Unlike Ralph’s elated reaction, Bill’s was resentment. He’d taken one look at Liz and said, “You.”

Liz, true to form, had simply said, “Who else?”

“I don’t know what the little green guys were thinking.” He starts to pace across the carpet in front of the window. “Now, I can see why they gave the suit to you—you’re an all-right dame. But Agent A-Plus here…”

Now Pam’s only known Liz for a day, but she doesn’t deserve this. “Hang on, Bill. You think the aliens chose wrongly? Maybe they were wrong to choose you! If this choice is suspect, then logic follows that none of their choices can be trusted. And furthermore—”

Bill holds up his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay, enough with the closing arguments, Counselor. I give.” He turns to Liz, who is standing there silent and still, arms folded. “Yeah, I know you were this wunderkind, future-of-the-modern-FBI or some such nonsense. But book learning and boots-on-the-ground experience are two different things. You’ve been working a desk most of your career.”

She shrugs. “Waiting for my time.”

Pam reaches for the instruction book, holding it out to Bill like a lure. “Book learning is what we need in this case, I think.”

His whole demeanor changes, his face lighting up with excitement. “You got your own book? Oh, boy, finally!”

Ralph appears by her side, and she opens it for the first time. The odd alien letters resolve into English. She flips through the subject headings: flight, speed, invulnerability, strength, invisibility, extra-sensory perception, languages, and more. 

“Flip to the part about the ‘cosmic responder,’” Bill says. “We never got to try that.”

Pam shakes her head. “I think I’d better start out with the basics. Let me get my feet under me first.” She tilts her head at Ralph. “What do you think I should start with?”

“I don’t know.” That’s when she notices he’s frowning. “I can’t read it. At all.”

“What?!” Bill shouts. “But you’re wearing the suit!”

“Each book must be keyed to a specific user,” he says, his voice flat with disappointment. Then he takes a deep breath. “Start with flying… and landing. I never got the hang of that.” He’s wearing a small, encouraging smile, his teacher spirit kicking in.

She hugs him in a rush, not sparing the super-strength. “Whatever I learn I’ll teach you, okay? This has to be another reason they gave it to me. We can help each other.”

“Yeah.” He hugs her back. “We will.”

 

_Flying away on a wing and a prayer_

It turns out instructions meant for Pam don’t work perfectly for Ralph. But it’s close enough—now he only takes a few skittering steps after landing, while Pam sticks the dismount. And she’s determined not to lose the book like Ralph did, twice. She scans through and finds instructions in using a sort of subspace pocket in the lining of the suit. She can carry the book there during missions, and her briefcase, and clothing, and a makeup kit… Ralph tries to use it and all he does is find a hole to nowhere that shocks him with electricity. 

But together they figure out telepathy and teleportation, and a force shield they can extend to protect those around them. And she needs him for those—they only work when they’re touching in some way.

She starts to wear the suit all the time, even to work. It makes her job so much easier, being able to guide her questions based on the feelings and intentions of both her clients and witnesses on the stand. The partners are starting to take notice. She’s sorry now how much grief she gave Ralph over wearing the suit. It’s an amazing feeling.

But there are also downsides to the suit. One of the partners approaches her about coming to dinner—“Bring that sweet husband of yours along!”—but she has to decline. There’s an operation that night and she can’t face Liz’s silent disappointment if she cancels. Instead she reads disappointment from the partner, followed by quick dismissal. It hurts. But it’s the way things have to be. How could she handle a promotion anyway? She couldn’t deal with the added responsibility and keep up the part-time superheroing.

It’s especially true on the nights when she’s got a big case in the morning, but they’re halfway across the globe finding a bomb, or stopping a natural disaster. Afterward, he flips idly through the instruction book every once in awhile, hoping there will be a section she missed, something about stopping time, or reliving time, anything to help her get a few extra hours sleep. Sometimes there will be something new—especially if they’re in the middle of a crisis with no way out. She sits up in bed, closes her eyes and folds her hands. “Dear… alien guys.” That’s not right but she hasn’t figured out how to communicate with them directly. _Cosmic Responder_ didn’t turn out to be that after all. So this is worth a shot. “Please show me how to keep saving the world, while also saving my sanity. Humans need sleep—maybe your kind don’t? Anyway, help. Thanks.” But when she looks again there’s nothing new. Guess sleep isn’t a high priority for their alien benefactors. She sighs, turns out the light and closes her eyes.

Ralph slides into bed beside her, wrapping his arm around her to spoon, and he makes a sound of surprise. “You’re still wearing it?”

“Yeah.” She’s finding it gives her just a little deeper sleep, and sometimes she dreams of future events or unknown information that can help her in the future. But she must have forgotten to put her pajamas on over the top. Oops.

“How? I can hardly wait to get out of the thing, it’s so uncomfortable.”

“It’s not so bad, like stockings, but for the whole body. A body stocking?” Is that a real thing already? She’s not sure, and she just wants to sleep.

“Okay,” he says, but she can feel that he doesn’t believe her. “But you gotta take a break sometime, honey, or you’ll burn out.”

“Mm hmm,” she replies, and she thinks he might be still talking to her, but she’s already asleep, having visions of a terrorist attack in Kuwait. They go stop it from happening the next day, after she wins her case. It’s nice being able to read the opposing counsel’s notes with X-ray vision.

 

_Who could it be?_

So six months pass, and they all settle into a routine. Some missions need all four of them, some only two. So what if she and Liz start taking more of the solo cases? She finds she likes it, the feeling of helping the world at large as well as helping her clients. When she’s tiring out too much, she takes a personal day and just sleeps. No one at work seems to mind, not with her win-loss ratio. And she also gets to be pickier about which cases she takes, too. Only ones that are open and shut, or have a quick turnaround. 

Every once in awhile they have a quiet week, where nothing much happens. She looks forward to these weeks, though she doesn’t trust them. They always feel like the calm before the storm. During the latest one, she’s sitting on the sofa, watching TV and doing a little light instruction book reading during the commercials, when the front door opens.

“Guess who’s here?” Ralph announces, leading his son, Kevin, ahead of him. His face is smiling, but his eyes are tight. He’s emanating apologies. Pam quickly hides the book behind the couch cushions, even though logically she knows the boy couldn’t read it.

“Kevin!” she says, holding her arms out. “Give me a hug.”

Kevin sets down his duffel bag, and stands there looking at her. Then he looks back up at his father. “Can I go to my room?” 

Ralph runs a nervous hand through his curls. “Yeah, I guess so.”

They both watch him go. “What did I do?” she asks. She and Kevin have always gotten along, but this time all she felt from him was embarrassment at the hug request and relief when he got to leave the room.

“Nothing. He’s eleven. It comes with the territory.” He sits beside her. “His mom dropped by after school today, said she had a job and could I take him this week?” He sighs. “You know I couldn’t say no. I rarely see him as it is.”

It’s true. She can’t remember the last time she saw him. Certainly not since she and Ralph got married. And for the first part of the week he stays mostly in his room or watching TV without talking. Even at meals he’s silent. It’s a very good thing that it’s a slow heroing week.

But something changes mid-week. He starts asking questions about her day, or Ralph’s. He wants to come along whenever one of them leaves the house in the evening. Thank goodness it’s all grocery store runs and getting gas.

On Friday evening, there’s a knock at the door. Pam’s at the kitchen table, files spread out in front of her, and Ralph is working the football game at school. Before Pam can rise to answer it, Kevin hops up to turn the doorknob.

“Who is this?” Liz asks from the doorway.

Uh oh. Is there a mission? Normally, she’d be happy to take off at a moment’s notice. “This is Kevin, Ralph’s son. He’s staying with us for a few days.” She turns to Kevin, who is actually bouncing with interest. Such a change from the beginning of the week. “This is Liz, my… friend.”

“Ah, yes, the son,” Liz says, as if it were a piece of stray info slotted into place. “We need to talk.” 

“Are there bad guys to fight?” 

Both women turn to Kevin, eyes widening. Pam tries to remain calm. “What do you mean, sweetie?”

He points at her collar. “You know… pow! Bam! What you and Dad do on the side.”

She flushes as red as the suit she didn’t realize was visible at her neckline. But she can’t tell him the truth, not an eleven-year-old boy. “I don’t know what you—”

“—It’s okay. I can keep a secret. I saw Dad wearing it and then I saw a photo later. Mom told me that’s why I can’t live with you guys fulltime, he’s too busy. But I couldn’t tell anyone about it.”

“Huh.” It’s actually kind of sweet, that Alicia would tell her son a story to spare his feelings. It’s not her fault it turned out to be true.

“But I didn’t believe her. I thought it was just a story she was making up, that she thought I was some dumb kid. Then I found Dad’s suit hanging in the closet.”

It explains why Kevin was so taciturn at first and then suddenly chatty. “Um…”

“You have one and he has one,” Kevin continues excitedly. “Is there one for me, too?”

Liz is giving her a you’ve-got-to-fix-this-and-now sort of look. She does, _she absolutely does_. Maybe there’s something in the book about erasing or changing memories. She hates the thought, but what else can be done? She turns around and unbuttons her blouse to get at the subspace pocket. But when she digs around inside, it’s not there. “Oh, no.”

“What?” Liz asks calmly, but inside her anger is flaring hot.

“The book,” she whispers, turning around. She doesn’t bother rebuttoning. “I can’t find it.”

“ _What_?” Her temper is showing outwardly now.

“Oh!” Kevin says. “The little black one? I found it on the couch, and it looked like it was written in some sort of code, so I took it to the library after school to try to see if I could find a book to help me translate it…” He runs off toward his bedroom.

“The kid better have it,” Liz says.

“And if he doesn’t?” Pam shoots back. “He’s only a boy.”

Kevin comes running back with his backpack and sets it on the sofa. “It’s in here,” he says, digging through the contents. “I put it in here after I…” He starts to take things out, tossing them haphazardly on the cushions. “...oh no.”

She looks inside. The backpack is now empty, and the book isn’t on the sofa, just a lot of wrappers and textbooks and broken colored pencils. Kevin looks like he’s about to cry.

“It’s okay, it’s all right, I can try to find out what happened…” She places her hands on Kevin and his backpack, willing a vision to come. A window to the past opens up before her. She sees Kevin in the library, reading the book, or trying to, using a code-breaking book as a guide. Then he looks up and sees the time. He shoves all his things into his backpack and takes off… leaving the book on the table. She sees a librarian pick it up, turn it over in her hands curiously, then place it in the lost and found. 

Pam sighs with relief. “I think we can get it back. It’s at the library.”

She feels him on the front steps before he opens the door, so she turns to face him as he steps in. “I’m home, how’d the—” He stops, taking in Liz, Kevin and Pam’s half-revealed suit. “Oh, boy.”

“He found your suit,” she explains. He frantically checks his collar, where he’s wearing the suit currently. She continues, “In your closet, earlier this week.”

“It’s awesome!” He runs up as Ralph is closing the door to hide the view from the neighbors. “Are you super-strong? Are you the guy they talk about on the news? Can you fly?” His voice rises in pitch. “Can you take me flying!?”

She places her hand on Ralph’s shoulder, her thumb touching the fabric of his suit. She sends a thread of telepathy. _He lost the book, too._ Ralph’s body goes rigid with alarm. _But I found it in a vision. It’s in the lost and found at the library. He was trying to decode it._

He places his hand on her waist to touch her suit. _Good._ He looks down at Kevin, who is still making a laundry list of super-requests. _What are we going to do?_

 _I was hoping the book might have something…_ She doesn’t want to say what she’s thinking, but he’ll probably sense it anyway. She bites her lip. _Maybe a way to erase his memory._

He looks down again. Kevin, quiet Kevin, is overflowing with excitement. _I don’t know about that._

 _It’s either that or make him think we’re crazy roleplayers._ She squeezes his shoulder in sympathy. _Do you really want to gaslight your own son?_

_Do we really want to alter his mind?_

Ralph sighs aloud, and Kevin stops talking. “What’s wrong, Dad?”

“Nothing. Hey, what do you say we get some dinner, then I’ll explain everything.” Kevin nods enthusiastically. 

That should give Ralph time to make a decision. She doesn’t envy him. She starts to button up. “I’ll head to the library and retrieve the book. 

“But—!” Liz argues.

“This comes first. _Family_ comes first.” She doesn’t let Liz get in another word, stepping outside the door and disappearing. If they’re lucky, the book will solve this conundrum. And maybe, Kevin will have a night he’ll never forget—until he has to.

 

_Believe it or not, it’s just me_

“Here?” Ralph asks, looking out of the windows. “Why?”

“Where else?” She waves her hand to start the music and her 1981 playlist infuses the air around them. “It’s where it all began.” The desert isn’t as desolate as it was fifty years ago, civilization has crept in, as everywhere, but this particular spot has stayed remarkably quiet.

His mouth crinkles up in a smile, laugh-lines well ingrained into his face. He’d never wanted treatments to keep young-looking, and neither had she. She’s proud of the gray streaked through her black. Honestly, neither of them have aged as much as their contemporaries—wearing the suits for 25 years had kept them both young-looking. But it was starting to either look like they’d both had a _lot_ of work done, or they were actually immortal, so they’d passed the torch.

In the days before they’d made the decision, Pam had tried to see their future, to see what would happen to the world if they gave it up. All she could see was black, no matter what she tried. “What does it mean, Ralph? Is the world destroyed? Do we die?”

He’d wrapped his arms around her and murmured into her hair, “I’m sure it just means we can’t see our own futures, or we just can’t see that far. We have each other. It’ll be okay.”

And it had been, because they did.

The new owners of the suits are a couple in Asia, which is a hot-spot these days. Ralph and Pam don’t know who they are, and the new heroes don’t know them, either (she thinks), but they’re doing fine. She keeps an eye on any news reports about the seemingly impossible.

She leans over to give him a kiss, slow and gentle. “Happy anniversary,” she tells him softly.

Then the power goes out, the music cutting off in the middle of a word. “Not again,” he says, just as she’s thinking the same thing. And there they are, spinning down from above, their vessel much the same as it looked fifty years ago. It’s amazing how much has changed on Earth in that same time.

But not this. The music player switches back on, the sampled human voices communicating their message. _Would… you… join… us...? We… can... heal… you..., make… you… young… again…._

Pam looks over at Ralph, but she can’t read his face in the faint glow of the dashboard. Is he considering it?

_You… gave… your… world… twenty-five… more… years… of… life…. Will… you… give… it… twenty-five… more…?_

“What will happen if we don’t?” Pam asks. 

_You… will… die…. In… your… own… time…._

Ralph catches her eye. She threads her fingers through his and gives his hand a squeeze. “That sounds good to me,” Ralph says. He squeezes back.

And it is.


End file.
